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The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.
It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration's initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective -- a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared "mission accomplished," with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda's leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied. ...
Bin Laden had nothing to do with fostering these misconceptions. None of this had any real connection to 9/11. There was no group known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" at that time. But the political climate of the moment overcame whatever flaccid opposition there was to invading Iraq, and the United States marched into a second theater of war, one that would prove far more intractable and painful and draining than its supporters had envisioned.
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Classic overreaction that every informed American should remember on every 11 September. Too many still want to respond as extremists rather than learn from mistakes. A fundamental difference between a moderate and an extremist.
See those empty stores in malls? Those abandoned homes? So many unemployeed because recessions occur maybe seven years after a war inspired by lies? Trophies to an overreaction that bin Laden so successfully inspired. Too many of us failed to learn from history (
Deja Vue Nam).
We will make the same mistake in another 30 years because too many will again patronize extermists and their destructive overreactions. Those who really learned from 11 September now appreciate how bin Laden so successfully got us to so seriously harm ourselves.